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Trade Associations

Attending trade association meetings is, perhaps, the best way to acquire a broad knowledge of the offerings in the payments marketplace. The following associations are all recommended for this purpose. The firm makes an effort to attend a number of these shows:

Please let us know how we can make your knowledge complete to be a strong competitor in the payments marketplace.

Payment Network Rules

Visa, MasterCard and other acquiring organizations have adopted rules that are, de facto, the law of the land for many issues between acquiring banks, issuing banks, processors, ISOs and agents. Below are links to sites that publish the rules:

Jurisprudence

Below is a small selection of interesting cases from payments, but does not purport to be a current or complete survey of such caselaw:

IN RE: AMERICAN EXPRESS MERCHANTS’ LITIGATION, United States Court of Appeals For the Second Circuit, January 30, 2009, Docket No. 06-1871-cv:
Held that the validity of a waiver of a right to a class action claim in an Amex Card Services Agreement is properly decided by the Court and not by arbitration despite an arbitration clause and (b) the waiver of the right to a class action claim in the Amex Card Service Agreement is unenforceable because it would de facto grant Amex immunity from antitrust liability by removing the Plaintiff`s only reasonably foreseeable means of recovery. The underlying case, not decided upon in this decision, relates to the fact that Amex, a credit card acquirer that is more expensive to merchants partly because of its higher-end clientele, is getting into lower-end card issuing. The Honor All Cards requirement of the Amex Card Services Agreement requires merchants to accept all Amex cards and thereby forces merchants to decide between (a) accepting all Amex cards, including lower-end cards that are markedly more expensive than Visa and MasterCard equivalents, and (b) rejecting all Amex cards and depriving themselves of the higher-end customers.

LML Patent Corp. v. JP Morgan Chase & Co. et. al. Original Statement of Claim, US District Court, Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division Case No. 08-338, November 19, 2008:
LML filed suite against JP Morgan and 18 other defendants, including PayPal that provide equipment, systems and services that convert paper checks into electronic transactions. The suite claims that the defendants violated US Patent No. RE40220 which is a method of carrying out a conversion of a check into an ACH.